It’s little known outside the food and beverage community that when the “Surly Bill,” which allows breweries to sell pints of their beer on site, became law in 2011, a companion bill dramatically lowered the fee for opening a distillery in Minnesota.

The fee dropped from $30,000 to around $1,000.

What does that mean for you, dear reader? That the craft-spirits boom that has been sweeping the rest of the nation is coming here, and fast.

A few distilleries are already in the works, and more are sure to follow.

Unfortunately, current laws don’t allow distilleries to offer more than a half-ounce sample of their products. They also can’t sell bottles of their liquor on site.

Background: Colorado businessman Adrian Panther started the first distillery in the state last year after noticing the lack of craft spirits in Minnesota, despite a booming industry elsewhere in the country. His distillery is ahead of the game; it has nearly 800 barrels of whiskey and bourbon aging.

Master distiller Brett Grinager worked with a master distiller at Maker’s Mark before coming to Panther.

Background: When partners Lee Egbert and Bob McManus met, each was already planning to start a distillery. The men merged visions and teamed up to create 11 Wells.

Egbert is an avid mixologist who has his own line of bitters, tinctures and cocktail salts called Dashfire. McManus is the science nerd. He has a degree in microbiology and an interest in the history of distilling in Minnesota that borders on obsession.

The pair are busy gutting the old blacksmith and pipe shop at the Hamm’s Brewery site on the East Side and hope to begin distilling in a few months.

The name of the distillery is a nod to its location — apparently, there are 11 wells beneath the site that supplied Hamm’s. Egbert and McManus also will make Minnesota 13 whiskey, based on moonshine that kept parts of the state fed during Prohibition. The moonshine is named for the type of corn used to make it, and the first crop is harvested and now drying.

Background: Bartley Blume, a home-brewer and former aerospace engineer, quit his desk job to do what he loves. He is brewing and bottling beers out of the Pour Decisions brewery while he looks for a space of his own. He’ll add spirits to the mix when he gets the proper permits.

He’ll be making spirits that are based on grains used in beer, like a smoked pure malt whiskey that’s unaged but will be filtered through a charred oak barrel to give it more depth than a white whiskey. He also promises a gin that’s full of botanicals and aromatics and a bourbon “like no one’s ever seen before.”

Blume says using craft-brewery-quality grains will improve the taste of his spirits and drastically reduce aging time.

Background: Jon Bohlinger and Jesse Griffin are childhood friends who used to joke about starting a company. Bohlinger is a business-school grad; Griffin went to law school. When the fee for distilling was reduced in 2011, Bohlinger — who says he’s “the kind of nerd who reads through those things” — saw the change and thought distilling would be “fantastic to do for a living.”

The pair are in negotiations for a lease on a building in the Twin Cities and are busy studying (they are scholars, after all) how to make “diverse gins” and a vodka.

Background: Husband-and-wife team Michael Swanson and Cheri Reese are self-described “corporate refugees” who moved back to Swanson’s family farm to start a distillery.

The grains are grown on the farm, and every step — milling, mashing, fermenting, distilling, packaging — will be done on the farm. The idea started when Swanson was getting an MBA at St. Thomas and wrote a paper about a craft distillery.

Swanson, who has a minor in chemistry and will be the head distiller, has trained with distilleries around the country, including 45th Parallel in Wisconsin. Reese has a marketing background.

They are farther along than some others on the list — their gin will be available for sale next month and they’ll have a spiced rum ready in time for Christmas.

Background: Rick Schneider is a college art professor (he teaches glass blowing) who grew up in Rochester, Minn., but lived in Virginia, Maryland and Alabama before coming back to the state to start living his dream — distilling.

He and his wife looked at 70 hobby farms before settling on one just outside Isanti. Their distillery will be located on the property.

Originally, Schneider wanted to grow the grain for his whiskey, but it turns out he doesn’t have enough acreage. No matter, he has organic farmers growing for him “within two miles” of his future distillery. “You can’t get much greener than that,” Schneider said.

Schneider might be the most well-trained of the state’s startup distillers. He attended a weeklong hands-on workshop at Dry Fly Distillery in Spokane, Wash., and also worked as an intern in Michigan State University’s distiller program — the only collegiate alcoholic beverages program in the country.

When he was there, he created a rye whiskey that is now aging in barrels, ready to be sold as soon as he opens.

Background: Emily and Joel Vikre were living in Boston and working at desk-based jobs when they made a trip to Duluth for a visit. Emily’s parents, who live in Duluth where she grew up, had just attended a Swedish whiskey tasting. The four of them started thinking: If the Swedes can make whiskey, why not Minnesotans?

“If anyone in the world has great grain, peat and water, it’s Minnesota,” Emily Vikre said. “It just kind of stuck.”

She describes their gin line as “boreal” — based on forest and terroir — with juniper, spruce and cedar as the bases.

Some traditional aquavit ages in barrels that travel in ships from Norway to Australia and back, and the Vikres hope to send some of their barrels out in ships on Lake Superior.

Emily Vikre is working on a Ph.D. in food policy and nutrition and has a cooking blog (fiveandspice.com). Joel Vikre has helped start several nonprofits and is versed in the business end of things.

Background: High-school pals Mark Schiller and Simeon Rossi started thinking about making their own liquor after a white Russian party during which Rossi, a bar manager at Harriet Brasserie in Minneapolis, made his own version of Kahlua. Both men live in the Twin Cities, but since start-up costs would be lower in Northfield, they settled on a building there.

That location is also closer to the farmers, which fits with the pair’s vision of keeping their carbon footprint small. They’ll be using locally foraged and grown botanicals — such as spearmint, wintergreen and sarsaparilla — in their gin. The base of their gin will be a white whiskey that has been distilled a second time, and they envision having a line of gins in different styles.

Rossi is a bar man who has an organic chemistry background. Schiller, who works at Best Buy, will be the business manager and marketing guru.

Jess Fleming has been with the Pioneer Press since 1999, and has been covering the Eat beat since 2012. She is an adventurous eater, cook and gardener, but will only grow something she can eat. She is a graduate of the journalism school at the University of Minnesota and a native of Eastern Wisconsin, where she grew up eating good brats, good cheese and fresh vegetables from her dad’s garden.

As you comment, please be respectful of other commenters and other viewpoints. Our goal with article comments is to provide a space for civil, informative and constructive conversations. We reserve the right to remove any comment we deem to be defamatory, rude, insulting to others, hateful, off-topic or reckless to the community. See our full terms of use here.

More in Things to Do

The French architect Emmanuel Louis Masqueray was particular about sound when he designed the Cathedral of St. Paul and the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis. Not long after the turn of the century, Masqueray built St. Paul’s Church on the Hill. The Summit Avenue church, built in 1912, soon could open its doors to performing arts shows as well...

Minnehaha Mile — a stretch of shops along Minnehaha Avenue and some offshoot streets nearby — is an emerging shopping district in Minneapolis’ Longfellow neighborhood like no other. The area is home to quirky, locally owned shops with plenty of heart and soul. The area is especially a destination for shopping antique, vintage, repurposed and upcycled pieces as well as specialty stores....

Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas” is winner of the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, one of the largest literary prizes in the country. The debut collection was among PEN American Literary Awards announced Tuesday at an evening ceremony at New York University. Published by Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press, “Whereas” confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties...

Jessica Chung was in the fourth grade when her mother taught her the art of calligraphy. The elegance of the script appealed to her then just as it does now. “I’ve always had a natural tendency toward art and creative things,” says Chung. It was only after finishing her schooling and getting settled in her career, however, that Chung had...

Pink Floyd’s 1979 double album “The Wall” spawned several tours and books, a feature film, an opera and now … a ballet. Twin Cities Ballet of Minnesota is staging “Pink Floyd’s The Wall: A Rock Ballet” March 1 through 3 at the Cowles Center in downtown Minneapolis. And tickets are going fast. “Demand has been unprecedented,” said TCB co-artistic director...